A Note on Ur III Text Duplicates

This material is based upon work supported by the
National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0000629.

§1. Among the tens of
thousands of sealed and unsealed Ur III documents that have been published to
date a couple of hundred unsealed documents have the subscript gaba-ri kišib-ba, “copy of a sealed document”
(see G. Selz, ASJ 17 [1995] 251-274, for a philological discussion of gaba-ri, which following him [esp. p. 270] and others I
translate conventionally “copy”). So far, the search for the expected
administrative pair of a sealed document and its corresponding copy has been
futile.

§2. There do exist, however,
a small number of documents that are (almost) exact copies of each other (see
for example M. Yoshikawa, “A New duplicate of YOS IV, No. 67 // V. Scheil, RA24/1, No.8c,” ASJ 7 [1985] 191-192).
Some of these copies have been proven to
be modern “fakes” made from a mold, presumably fabricated by using an original
“clay envelope” to produce the copy (see M. Hilgert, “Notes and
Observations on the Ur III Tablets from the Oriental Institute,” JCS 49
[1997] 45-50).

§3. For a list of Drehem duplicate records see M. Hilgert, OIP 121, pp. 40-42 (table 4.2).
Whereas the two texts presented here are the first pair of a sealed tablet and its copy to have been recognized
in the Umma corpus, Drehem has yielded numerous such examples. Hilgert describes pp. 31-42 the Drehem duplicates
that can be distinguished semantically from Umma examples: the term gaba-ri kišib-ba is never used in Drehem duplicates
(OIP 121, p. 31 with n. 100). Whereas Umma texts using the term gaba-ri kišib-ba were for the most part copies of receipts,
all Drehem tablet copies documented transfers rather than receipts (OIP 121, pp. 38-39). Most Umma duplicates relate to
the administration of the “estate” of the governor, and there is evidence to suggest that Umma duplicates were those documents
the governor kept while posting the originals to Ur for inspection (for example, AAICAB 1,
1: Ashm. 1912-1143 [Šulgi 28], rev. 8:
gaba-ri kišib e2-gal gal2-am3, “copy of a sealed tablet which is in the palace”). A few tablet containers
(pisan dub-ba) contained
copies of sealed tablets (for example, UTI 3,
2098, dating to Amar-Suen 9), most of which documented the affairs of the
governorís office; the person about whom the most duplicates were written, Lukala, fulfilled an essential function in the household of the
governor, perhaps as chief household administrator (šabra (e2); see MVN 16,
1294, dated to Šu-Suen 3 x).

§4. All duplicate documents qualified by gaba-ri kišib-ba are unsealed. Although it is now in most
cases possible to reconstruct the original document from its copy, it may be opportune to record some further observations here.
The copy of a document that contained the statement ki PN1-ta kišib PN2, “from PN1, sealed document of PN2,” was recorded as ki
PN1-ta gaba-ri kišib(-ba) PN2, “from PN1, copy of the sealed document”. The copy of a document that contained the statement ki
PN1-ta PN2 šu ba-ti, “from PN1, PN2 received,” was recorded as ki PN1-ta PN2 šu ba-ti gaba-ri kišib-ba, “from PN1, PN2 received,
copy of the sealed document” only when the receiving and the the sealing party were identical (see, for example, TCNU460). When
the sealing party and the receiving party were different persons (for example, in UCP 9/2/2,
1, dating to Amar-Suen 2 ix), the
duplicate indicated that it was a “copy of the sealed document of PN3” (gaba-ri kišib PN3; for example, TLB 3,
68).

§5. In addition, gaba-ri is used a number of times as a “note” on the edge of a document, apparently with
the simple meaning “copy”. A good example of this bookkeeping device is YOS 4,
79. This account, recording four distinct
transactions, contained the following information on its edge: gaba-ri 3(diš)-kam, “it is the copy of three sealed tablets”
(where we would expect the number “four”, three is possible, since two transactions may have been recorded on one and the
same sealed document).

§6. In all likelihood, a renewed study of the entire body of Ur III administrative texts, with the goal of
reconstructing their ancient archives, will provide us with numerous examples of such Umma sealed documents and their copies
as the pair transliterated below, both of which are housed in the British Museum. The sealed document was published by T. Fish
as MCS 8,
97
(= BM 113102, collation Orient 17, 43). A transliteration of its unsealed copy (BM
108081, unpublished) is included here, with the kind
permission of its editors, M. Molina and M. Such-Gutierrez (to appear in the Nisaba series). Both texts are dated
to the 3rd month of the 9th year of Amar-Suen.